Good Living for Whom? Bolivia’s Climate Justice Movement and the Limitations of Indigenous Cosmovisions

Abstract

Climate change has become an important issue in Bolivia as communities across the lowlands and highlands are beginning to feel the direct effects of the ecological crisis. While Evo Morales, the current president of Bolivia, has surfaced as an international superstar for the climate justice movement, behind his public appearances at UN climate conferences are indigenous organizations and social movements who work daily to map out strategies for adaptation and mitigation. This paper analyzes how indigenous climate justice activists in Bolivia mobilize a particular vision of Andean indigeneity, frozen in time and space, to make specific political claims about their rights in relationship to the environment and propose alternative economic structures. Many activists argue that the ecological problems of this century are a direct result of advanced capitalism, which has turned lands, forests, and natural surrounds into commodities. However, their timeless vision of indigeneity, particularly using the imagined ayllu or pre-Columbian land-holding patterns as solutions to climate crisis, poses dangers for the millions of Bolivians who live and work in urban centers.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• resources
• indigeneity
• ayllus; social movements

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the members of the Bolivian Platform for Climate Change and the vecinos of El Alto for their time and generosity. I am indebted to Tom Perreault for his insightful comments and suggestions. I wish to extend a special thank you to Nancy Postero for her support, guidance and patience in this process. Thanks to all the anonymous reviewers for strengthening the argument of the paper. All errors are mine.

Notes

[1] According to the Bolivian Platform for Climate Change, in order to reverse the effects of climate change, humans must accept a carbon threshold representing the total amount of carbon that the Earth’s natural systems can absorb. Consonant with the threshold is a tax that would be levied on the highest nation state users of carbon resources. This tax would redistribute resources from wealthier to relatively poor economies. At an international level, negotiations focus on how to share the Earth’s atmospheric space between rich and poor countries, and how to share the means – the financing and technology – required to live in this space (see World People’s Conference on Climate Change, http://pwccc.wordpress.com/category/working-groups/08-climate-debt/).

[2] This is part of an interdisciplinary and longitudinal study on the localized experiences of and the new organizational tactics to address water scarcity as a result of the melting glaciers in the highlands. Kathryn Hicks from the University of Memphis and Carlos Revilla from UNITAS (National Unity of Institutions for Social Action), a Bolivian-based NGO focused on social justice, are also principal investigators.

[3] Oxfam International played an important role in supporting these early Ayllu projects. As Lucero (2011) notes, the relationship between THOA and Oxfam America is emblematic of the transnational nature of the resurgence of the ayllus. Support for indigenous organizations marked a trend in the 1980s when Oxfam America began to fund indigenous organizations as part of its rights-based approach to addressing issues of poverty and social exclusion.

[4] In Aymara, Buen Vivir is referred to as Suma Qamaña. In Guarani, Good Living is Ñandereko. In Quechua, Buen Vivir is Sumak Kawsay.

[5] As Nancy Postero (2007) notes, much of this NGO discourse and practice was shaped by multicultural reforms passed under the Sanchez de Lozada administration in the 1990s, which recognized Bolivia as a ‘multiethnic’ and ‘pluricultural’ nation.

[6] Similar NGO-funded projects in the 1980s and 1990s have encouraged the use of creative strategies from the ancient Andean past in order to deal with agricultural problems in the contemporary period. Due to the failure of the Green Revolution to provide food security, several governments, working in collaboration with NGOs, created the Proyecto Interinstitucional de Rehabilitacion de Waru-Waru en el Altiplano (PIWA), which aimed at assisting local farmers in the reconstruction of system of raised fields that evolved on the high plains of the Andes about 3000 years ago. These waru-warus consisted of platforms of soil surrounded by ditches filled with water. They produced bumper crops in the face of floods, droughts, and the killing frosts common at altitudes of almost 4000 m. Some of these projects proved quite successful (see Altieri, 1996).

[7] For more on Oxfam’s project, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8187866.stm.

[8] There has been a lot of discussion about REDD+ (to reduce emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation, the second largest source of emissions that cause climate change) at international climate change negotiations. The Bolivian delegation has been quite outspoken in these international arenas, pointing toward the ways in which the forest has been turned into carbon stocks. Further, the forest provides a role as food security, a water source and biodiversity for indigenous populations. REDD reduces the function of the forest to just one, carbon stocks. For more on this, see http://www.rtcc.org/news-flash-bolivia-opposes-redd/

[9] See Climate is Not for Sale, http://links.org.au/node/3130

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Fabricant

Nicole Fabricant is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology at Towson University, 8000 York Road, LI 318 E., Towson, Maryland 21252 (Email: [email protected]).